Cross-modal impact of auditory experience on visual cortical entrainment in children who are hard-of-hearing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cross-modal neuroplasticity is a well-studied phenomenon whereby in the absence of sensory input (e.g., in individuals who are deaf or blind), the sensory cortices of the affected modality are "taken over" by the unaffected sensory systems. This neuroplasticity is often coupled with changes in the dynamics of the unaffected primary sensory cortices themselves. Nonetheless, whether these cross-modal changes extend to those with mild-to-severe sensory loss where sensory input is degraded but not absent, as is the case for children who are hard-of-hearing (CHH), remains poorly understood. Visual entrainment, sometimes referred to as the visual steady-state response, is the process by which the primary visual cortices entrain to the frequency of a rhythmic exogenous visual stimulus. Importantly, visual entrainment dynamics are thought to serve as an important proxy for how visual stimuli are processed in the brain. The current study sought to identify the impact of mild-to-severe hearing loss and individual differences in auditory experience on visual entrainment dynamics in youth. To this end, CHH and an age- and sex-matched group of children with normal hearing (CNH) were presented with a visual entrainment stimulus that flickered at 15 Hz during magnetoencephalography. Neural responses to the fundamental (15 Hz) and first harmonic (30 Hz) were imaged using beamforming, and the power envelope of the peak responses was extracted as a function of time and submitted to linear mixed effects modeling. We found a significant group-by-time interaction, whereby CHH exhibited a stronger increase in power during entrainment than CNH, suggesting altered entrainment dynamics. We also ran whole-brain correlations between 15 and 30 Hz neural responses and hearing aid use in CHH, controlling for degree of hearing loss. We found a significant negative relationship between hearing aid use and activity in the left primary auditory cortex and left lateral parietal cortex, such that CHH who consistently wore their hearing aids showed the smallest amount of cross-modal neuroplasticity in these regions. Crucially, reductions in cross-modal neuroplasticity in the left lateral parietal cortex were related to better verbal outcomes. These data provide important new information regarding how consistent auditory experience may serve to normalize the neural dynamics serving sensory processing, and how these changes may cascade into improvements in verbal ability in CHH.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".